What is a Digital Marketing Audit?

When you’re looking for the correct way to boost your business into digital marketing, or if you feel like the digital marketing strategy needs a breath of fresh air, it’s probably time for a digital marketing audit. When executed correctly, a digital marketing audit can provide you with the answers to what you could be doing to improve your ongoing strategy.

But, what is a digital marketing audit? A digital marketing audit is simply a thorough investigation of all your digital marketing efforts. The performance of all your practices, strategies, ads, and posts is evaluated–giving you an understanding of where your digital gaps and loopholes exist.

Get Started with Your Audit

Once you decide it’s time to audit your digital marketing efforts, you must make sure you have a firm idea of where you want to go. What are your goals for your website? Who do you want to reach with your ads, social media, or blog posts? Who is your audience and how do you want them to respond to your digital marketing?

When was the last time you worked on search engine optimization? In fact, how long have you had your website? Does it perform like you want it to? Is it optimized for mobile? These are just a few of the questions the audit will seek to answer. Once you have concrete and direct answers to all of these questions, you can get started with evaluations.

Which Tactics Do You Use?

No matter which digital marketing tactics your company uses to reach your audience, there is a correct way to audit them and evaluate your results.

Content Marketing Audit

When you’re initiating a content audit, you start by taking an inventory of blog and landing pages. At BigWing, we run your website through a search engine optimization crawler – better known as an SEO crawler – to learn more about the fundamentals of the content on your site. We learn about title tags, meta descriptions, and tons of other technical information about the existing content. We’ll consider both searchability and rankability, as well as what your target audience needs.

After looking at the technical aspects of your website content, we analyze the information we find and make recommendations on how to improve your current content and provide advice for an ongoing content strategy. We’ll deep dive into how well your content contributes to helping your customers find the information they need to make an informed purchase decision and pay attention to any gaps in your current content that should be filled by updates or brand new pieces of content.

Once we’ve compiled all the data and developed a strategy, some clients want our recommendations to implement themselves while others engage our services to make the recommended changes. Either way, once the content audit is complete, you will have a comprehensive strategic plan for moving forward with your content marketing.

Social Media Audit

BigWing’s social media specialists work with clients to define specific goals for their campaigns as a first step. Then they can analyze the client’s social media footprint. On which platforms have they created a community? How do they engage? With what voice and how often?

With that information in hand, the social media specialists can evaluate whether the stated goals mesh with the platforms, voice, and creative style currently being employed. The specialists assess how the social communities are moving from the top of the marketing funnel to the bottom.

Once the evaluation is finished, a strategy is created. It can be as simple as posting organically on Facebook or as complicated as a multiple platform and audience advertising plan.

Search Engine Optimization Audit

BigWing’s SEO team looks at all the technical aspects working behind the scenes of your website that most people don’t even realize are happening. The audit is very in-depth and delves into the background of a website, taking a look at metadata, crawlability, backlinks, and so much more.

The audit finds the errors preventing you from ranking higher and getting the traffic to your site you both desire and deserve. When you have a large site, but the traffic just isn’t there, an audit can help you understand why.

Put another way, the SEO audit is like a look under the car hood to find the issues, and every site – no matter how well built and kept – has issues. We take all the issues and arrange them into a report based on the importance of the error and how quickly it needs to be fixed. This report can have 60 pages or more.

With a list of best practices and a plan for how to fix the biggest problems first, an SEO audit can drive substantial changes in traffic for your website.

Website Audit

When we do a website audit at BigWing, it is focused closely on the user’s experience. Like every audit, it begins with discovering what the goal is for a website and discussing whether there are additional or updated goals that should be a priority.

We conduct user interviews and tree testing to see how people react to your website. Tree testing helps us find where people get lost while browsing the website and helps fix the problems developers don’t see.

Card sorting is another way BigWing tests the user experience of a website. Card sorting helps us discover how other people would arrange the information found on your website. It’s a fantastic way to learn where features of your website should live.

While the testing can take several rounds, when it is finished, BigWing is able to provide a “manual” for next steps we will take with the website. The strategy can also be shared with the client for them to implement themselves.

PPC Audit

Like most audits, a pay-per-click advertising audit is used to find out how the current campaigns are performing and to find ways to enhance their performance.

At BigWing, we look at the campaign settings and structure. We then evaluate the type of campaign that’s running, the time of day ads are serving, and multiple campaign metrics such as search impression share, click-through rate, average position, conversion rate, etc.

Once we gather this information, we create a document to inform the client what is performing well and what could improve. We use audits as an educational tool to help potential clients better understand their paid search campaigns.

Still Considering an Audit?

Combining the individual service audits creates a holistic view of your digital marketing efforts specifically created for you. It can help bring you more leads as well as increase your overall visibility on the internet.

When your site is more relevant and helpful to your audience, you will see additional growth and revenue flowing into your business. Additionally, the audits reinforce strategic marketing and help you accomplish your goals.

If you’re still considering whether a digital marketing audit is right for you, take some time to read more of our blog posts about the work we’re doing at BigWing. If you have more questions about audits or any other digital marketing services, don’t hesitate to contact us.